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May

2009

This is BS!

Written by Steven Wilson

Another Bul***it Night in Suck City is the story of Nick Flynn's journey to manhood. It is a rough journey. Flynn's father is never really around, partly because of a stint in prison for check fraud, his mother struggles to provide for her children and kills herself when Flynn is 22, and Flynn interacts with the most desperate people in the city of Boston while working at a homeless shelter there. During this gig, Flynn's father shows up at the shelter broke, mentally ill, and uncooperative. The author's detailed, finely-crafted reports on the homeless situation in Boston are eye-opening though many readers may find the intimate portraits of such dire straits to be unsettling. Flynn relays a good deal of information about his own struggles with alcoholism and drug abuse as well. This is certainly not light reading, but, as indicated by its receipt of the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, it is a masterfully written, thought provoking piece of literature.

If the above piques your interest in the finer points of BS, fear not, we have that covered. Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, has published an excellent exposition of BS fittingly titled On Bul***it.

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Dec

2008

The Closest Library: Your Computer

Written by Steven Wilson

Looking for something new to read? Why not try something OLD? You don’t even need to leave your computer to read some of the greatest works of the past. These websites allow you to read books on the Internet. You can also download texts to read on your computer or portable device. These can come in handy if your child leaves a book at school over the weekend and they have to have a chapter read by Monday. Now, you don’t need to get another copy at the library! Check these out

http://www.bartleby.com/fiction - Named for Herman Melville’s annoying character Bartleby the Scrivener (and yes, you can read that story here,) this is a collection of verse, non-fiction, reference and fiction. It includes Christie’s “Mysterious Affair at Styles,” Wharton’s “Age of Innocence,” Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” not to mention all of Shakespeare.

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog - Project Gutenberg includes 25,000 free online texts many more obscure than those at Bartleby. “What Maisie Knew” by Henry James, “Lord Arthur Seville’s Crime” by Oscar Wilde, “Eugene Onegin” by Pushkin. And an extra added bonus: say your child says, “I don’t remember the title of the book I have to read but it has this weird guy in it named ‘Thomas Gradgrind.’” Project Gutenberg offers “nearly full-text” searches of it’s online texts. You can use the Google-powered search to find out that your forgetful child needs to read “Hard Times” by Dickens.

http://www.fullbooks.com - Fullbooks offers thousands of online books (with minimal ads). Some not so classic, but still fun such as Mary Roberts Rinehart’s “The After House” and "Tik-Tok of Oz" by Baum.

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu - University of Pennsylvania’s online library boasts 30,000 titles. This is an index of titles available on the Internet, so you will be referred to another site when you pick a title. This includes classics plus modern (free) online fiction and non-fiction.

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